Crypto twitter, fraudulent founders, and dumping monsters.

There has been a ravaging menace. Fraudulent devs, skeptical minters, and undercutting monsters. NFTs have been under siege. Intentional devs spend several weeks and sometime months building and working on their life dreams, while the vibrant community raids, tags, engages every tweet and performs all community activities. But when mint day arrives, the undercutting beasts come out to play, and chase the beauties away. Ever wondered why? Here’s what I think.

Trust.

Trust issues play a major role in fueling this menace. Although NFTs were initially just about arts, minters who had come into the space with genuine intentions have found themselves become victims of rug-pulls from fraudulent devs. As NFTs went beyond “just arts”, several “devs” saw this as an opportunity to make lofty promises to their “utility-centric” communities. Whereas, the one true utility in view was to pull the rug and make themselves rich. Such scams became very common, and as a consequence, skepticism towards and during mint exercises heightened, for fear of becoming victims as well. And as this went on, minters decided to often go in for the “quick profit flip” during mint, giving birth to the undercutting menace.

The undercutting menace.

Although we are currently in the bear season, crypto has probably never seen bears as terrifying as the undercuters. “Take profit, cut loss” is a common phrase used to justify the action of destroying floor prices and plunging project’s market value into the deep beyond. As minters have lost trust in project developers, or just do not care about the projects’ utility, a very strong sell pressure is compounded while so many people are trying to make that quick flip. As such, floors could, in a matter of minutes, get destroyed, if there isn’t adequate buy pressure to match up the dumping by the minters. This often leads to more dumping than buying sweeping, then the race to “cut loss”, aka race to death, begins, and floors collapse rapidly.

It is so sad to witness, that at a time like this,

when NFTs are evolving, and contributing more than arts to the development of web3, negative elements hold NFTs by its balls, delaying its growth. This should be a time of massive adoption and widespread acceptance of not just NFTs, but crypto in general. The space is due for more, that I hope it gets really soon, and maybe the bulls may wake up again.

…

But before that happens, here are a few things I think we all, devs and minters, could work on, to ensure we aren’t busy plundering our own technology.

In spite of all these, we have also seen some projects come out to launch, and not only sell out, but also reach a considerably high floor price, defying the situation of the economy at present. I believe there are a lot to learn from such NFT projects, how their founders and team have worked, and how they were able to scale above the market conditions.

These are some of the peculiarities of these projects, that I presume if other project founders could imbibe, would not only help the minters, but also increase trust and development all round in the web3 ecosystem.

1. Self sufficiency. A lot of these projects were self sufficient, meaning they were free or relatively cheap mints, and didn’t need minters money for anything. As minters have lost trust in devs, investing as much as $100-$500 in projects, particularly with large supply, these days may seem like a cash grab. As a free mint project, all minters have to stake is the gas fee, which with proper planning, could be as low as, or even lower than $5. Worth the risk.
2. Be about your product. Q4 has seen a surge in gaming projects, which have mostly been the ones “doing quite well” in the market. Playable characters, P2E, F2P games have dominated the NFT ecosystem in high performance during the past few weeks. Perhaps, the public is evermore getting interested in value and utilities, who knows.
3. Backing. VC, angel, or corporate, when a project has established a tangible backing with a reputable organization, its chances of success in the market is quite heightened. And has been obviously proven with the likes of Azra, Tribo, and a few others hoping to follow in their footsteps.

As an active NFT and web3 participant, I know very well that putting a pin on how to succeed in this space is probably the first step towards failure. But lately, we have seen similar ingredients in several projects’ success soup. Hence, this writer doesn’t think it is out of place to assume that such would help not only the projects sell out, but also help the ecosystem.

I would argue that if fraudulent devs continue to dominate the market, minters would keep getting smarter and less interested in jumping into mints, whether legitimate or rug pulls. This would only have a negative impact on the NFT ecosystem, as trust would continually diminish, and prices of native tokens too decline as the ecosystem is now sick. So NFT project founders, as leaders and developers, would have to find alternative ways to develop this trust and rebuild volume in the market, even if it means sticking to free mints. And as for capital to build out their project, that’s where the backing comes in.

I hope you’ve had a great read.😎